Paris Review Daily have just published the fifth in my Écuyères series about the circus and hippodrome horsewomen of nineteenth-century Paris. It’s about Céleste Mogador, who was so many things it was hard to cram it all into the essay, not least because she left so much of her own life writing behind. Please go …
Continue reading “Céleste Mogador: Lioness of the Hippodrome”
The new Écuyères essay is up at the Paris Review Daily’s blog: it’s about Baroness Jenny de Rahden. This is part of a series on circus horsewomen of nineteenth-century Paris. The earlier essays are on Selika Lazevski (research blog here), Sarah l’Africaine (research blog here) and my obsession with these circus horsewomen (research blog here). …
Continue reading “The Baudelairean Horsewoman: Jenny de Rahden”
Chasing more horse ghosts in London.
I’ve been reading beautifully illustrated books about horses all my life and in the last twelve years I’ve trawled all sorts of academic articles and image libraries, so it’s always delightful to find an image I’ve never seen before. The Palazzo Pitti in Florence just opened an exhibit called Leopoldo de’ Medici: Prince of the …
Continue reading “Rapunzel Horses – the hot accessory of Early Modern Europe?”
The horse on the cover of Ulrich Raulff’s impressive new book is soaring, bridleless, riderless and all but headless. It has the fuzziness of distance but also the heft and hairiness of life; it is both figurative and real. In tracing our extended exit from the long 19th century, when horses powered nations and shaped …
Continue reading ““He had survived.” Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse”
Lucy Rees’ theories on the equine mind completed the jigsaw I was struggling to put together in The Age of the Horse. They are so down to earth and commonsense that it is hard to remember how one might ever have imagined horses living and interacting according to another, more human logic. I’m really delighted …
From Centaur or The Turn Out a practical treatise on the (humane) management of horses, either in harness, saddle, or stable; with hints respecting the harness-room, coach-house, &c. (1878) by Edward W. Gough, via Wikimedia Commons.
Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West came out in 2008 and remains definitive. It takes you from the arrival of the first Conquistadors’ horses – like Pedro de Alvarado’s “bright bay mare” “good both for tilting and to race” and the grey “Bobtail” who was “fast, and had …
From Centaur or The Turn Out a practical treatise on the (humane) management of horses, either in harness, saddle, or stable; with hints respecting the harness-room, coach-house, &c. (1878) by Edward W. Gough, via Wikimedia Commons.
I briefly mentioned King Duarte I of Portugal’s Livro da Ensinança de Bem Cavalgar Toda Sela (The Book on the Instruction of Riding Well in Every Saddle) in The Age of the Horse. It was written in 1434, 82 years before Xenophon’s On Horsemanship was first printed. If you’re used to the narrative in which …
Continue reading “Making Fearless Men: A Medieval Riding Lesson”
